Just who does Billy Connolly think he is?

BILLY CONNOLLY has stunned family and friends by agreeing to investigate his troubled childhood on hit BBC show Who Do You Think You Are?

Billy Connolly will appear on the TV show Who Do You Think You Are to learn about his forbears

The Big Yin is preparing for “a few skeletons to start rattling in the cupboard” when a team of genealogy detectives begin looking into his disturbing family past.

Filming is scheduled to begin next month on the programme, which will trace the comedian’s family tree going back from both his father William and mother Mary, who abandoned him and his elder sister Florence when he was three.

In his biography, Connolly, 70, has talked about his cafeteria worker mother taking flight in 1946 from the family home in Anderston, Glasgow, while his father was still away in the Army.

The book, written by his psychologist wife Pamela Stephenson, also documented years of physical and sexual abuse by his father.

In the TV show he Connolly is keen to learn more about his forebears, particularly his Irish immigrant grandfather.

Programme investigators have already unearthed surprising details of the maternal McLean side of the family.

Billy realises that making the programme is a risk because he won’t know much until they are recording to film his actual reaction to who and what they found

A source

According to a source, the producers of the BBC1 show had previously been turned down by Connolly.

But it was earlier in the summer while he was making a film with fellow Scot David Tennant, who appeared in a 2006 edition of the programme, that he had a change of heart.

A source said: “Billy realises that making the programme is a risk because he won’t know much until they are recording to film his actual reaction to who and what they found.”